Up To No Good
by CorellianWhiskey
Summary: It is Ginny Weasley, rather than Ron, who attends Hogwarts in Harry's year, a change with the potential to dramatically alter the course of events. Part One: in which they steal a valuable artifact
1. A Different Beginning

"Have a good term," Uncle Vernon spoke, the genial tone of his words undercut by the wholly nasty smile that now seemed to be firmly engraved into the thick folds of his face. Without waiting another moment or speaking another word, the visibly gleeful man, obviously relishing the situation, turned and walked away. Harry watched as he did, himself frozen where he stood, and was only able to refocus on the situation at hand after Vernon had rejoined the rest of the Dursleys at his car and, all three laughing loud enough that Harry could hear the uproar even from within the bustling crowds of the station, drove away. He simply stood there, entirely unsure of what to do, as the travelers and commuters around him moved to and fro, casting a good deal of funny looks in his direction. For that, Harry couldn't blame them- if not for the experiences of the previous month, he too would have given Hedwig, a massive and stark-white owl, at least a second glance.

He immediately decided that it would be best to ask around, rather than just stand there, doing nothing. "Pardon me," he managed to ask as clearly he could to a passing security guard, "do you know where the train to Hogwarts is?"

The man, tall and with a bushy mustache, looked around and then down, registering the question with pause. "I've never heard of anything called Hogwarts. Is that a village, somewhere?" he answered Harry's question, clearly a bit miffed.

"Um, no," Harry answered. He was very conscious of how he must have looked. He debated whether or not to mention that Hogwarts was a school, but concluded that if the man had never heard of it, doing so would be little help. And the platform, nine and three quarters? The whole thing was beginning to feel a bit like a prank.

The guard, clearly off-put by the unhelpful answer, nonetheless tried again, "Well, do you know what part of the country this Hogwarts is in?"

Harry looked down at his feet. No, he didn't. Where was it? Somewhere in Wales? "No, I don't," he answered, once again, he knew, unhelpfully.

At this, the guard seemed upset. "Boy, I can't help you if you don't tell me anything."

"Where's the train that leaves at eleven o'clock?" Harry tried. At the look on the man's face as well as his curt, dismissive, and audibly annoyed response that, no, there wasn't any train leaving at eleven o'clock, Harry was left hapless. The man strode away, muttering something under his breath as he did, thus leaving Harry alone, still clueless.

Soon, Harry began to worry and felt himself bordering on a panic. The big clock above the information board read that the time was only ten minutes until eleven, when the train was supposed to depart. Hagrid, Harry found himself believing, must have forgotten to tell him something important, about some button to push or some brick to hit. He had just started to fiddle with the clasp on his trunk in order to fish out his wand, which he intended to tap around against the inspector's stand or the bricks on the columns, like Hagrid had with the entrance to Diagon Alley, when something began tapping against him near the bottom of his boney shoulder blade.

In immediate response, Harry jumped around and confirmed his suspicions, that it was a finger. The previously tapping finger was, of course, attached to a person, one shorter than him and with flaming red hair cascading in long waves around her face, over her shoulders, and, Harry assumed, down her back. His eyes met hers, a bright and excited brown, and Harry couldn't quite manage out any word in response.

Fortunately for him, she could. "You're looking for the platform, aren't you?"

Harry looked her over for a moment with suspicion. If there was some big joke going on, she didn't seem like the sort to be in on it. "Nine and three quarters?" he questioned, slowly, somewhere between fearfully dreading and gleefully anticipating the response.

"That's the one!" the red-haired girl affirmed cheerfully. "The owl gives it away. You muggle-born? I wouldn't think you'd have much trouble finding it otherwise."

"Uh, what?" was all Harry was able to manage out before a plump, warm-looking woman with the same red hair as the girl in front of him had hurried over and put her arm securely around the shoulder of the girl. Harry quickly assumed that they were mother and daughter.

"Hello, dear," the woman beamed at him. "First time at Hogwarts, trying to find the platform? This is Ginny's first year, too," she continued, giving the girl, evidently named Ginny, a squeeze.

Ginny looked a bit uncomfortable. Harry rubbed the back of his head. "Er, yes, what gave it away?"

"The owl," she smiled. "That one's beautiful, isn't it, Ginny?"

"Yes, Mom," the girl managed out, shying away.

"We've got one of our own, over there," the mother kept on, returning her attention to Harry for a brief second before looking over and gesturing at a messy gathering of boys, each with the same red color of hair as the mother and daughter in front of Harry. Harry saw the owl the woman was referring to, but in the next brief second, she spoke again, her tone dramatically changed and her focus completely diverted away from Harry. "Fred! George! You two put your brother down this instant!" she snapped loud enough to garner startled looks from many passers-by.

Harry shifted his gaze from the caged owl to the two identical looking boys, whom he assumed to be Fred and George. Between the two was a third, much smaller looking boy, being hoisted into the air by the first two, each of whom had a firm hold of one the third boy's upper arm. From what Harry could tell, they had been trying to lift the third boy onto the top of one of their trolleys. A fourth boy, the oldest looking of the red-heads, looked on. At the sound of their mother's voice, the twins stopped their movements but kept their grip on the third, leaving him dangling in mid-air.

"He asked us to, mom!" one of the red-haired twins responded, indignant.

"Wanted to ride through the barrier, fast-like," the other added.

At that, the mother turned away from the scene, gave the girl, Ginny, a meaningful look, and then turned back and hurried over to deal with the situation. Harry, too, turned his attention towards Ginny, who had a smirk across his lips. "Do they do stuff like that often?" Harry asked.

"Like you wouldn't believe," the girl answered.

She and Harry looked at each other for several long moments, both of them, Harry, at least, entirely unsure of what to say to each other. Over a little bit away, the mother was talking to the boys, her hands on her hips. Harry watched for a moment, before once again turning his attention back to the red-haired girl, whose expression had become contemplative. "So where is the platform? There's not much time," Harry asked, gesturing his head towards a nearby clock, which read only six minutes until the eleventh hour.

"There," the girl, Ginny, said, gesturing to where the eldest-looking of the brothers, he himself evidently aware of the little amount of time left, was hurriedly pushing his trolley towards one of the barriers between platforms nine and ten. One moment, he was there, and the next, he was nowhere to be seen. Harry blinked, and Ginny gave a giggle. The eldest was soon followed by one of the twins, who, too, just vanished at a point, and that twin was in turn followed by the other, who was pushing not only his trolley, but the third boy who was sitting at its front, hands held forward in the air. It was not long before all the red-haired boys in the area were gone from sight, leaving Harry with only Ginny, and her mother, who was returning from the scene of the attempted, and then, apparently, permitted, crime.

"Well, Ginny," she started, sounding flustered and with an annoyed expression on her face, "there's not much time left. Come on."

The mother, looking distracted, moved to walk away, but Ginny grabbed ahold of one of her sleeves and, when she had her mother's attention, gestured towards Harry. "He doesn't know how to get onto the platform, Mom."

"Oh?" the mother said. She turned her gaze onto Harry. Then, she moved around, so that she was at his side, and pointed towards one of the brick barriers, the same one that the boys had vanished while running towards. "Do you see that barrier, between platforms nine and teen?" she asked.

Harry nodded.

"All you have to walk straight at it. Don't stop, don't be scared that you'll crash into it, you won't, that's very important. If you're nervous, it's probably best to do it at a bit of a run, no second guessing."

Harry nodded again. He moved, took a firm grasp of the handles of his trolley, and pushed it into line with the barrier. He took a breath, and was about to start moving forwards towards the brick, when the red-haired girl hurled into his view and jump on top of his trolley. She nestled herself next to Hedwig's cage, and then turned her head to hive Harry an expectant look. "If Ron gets to do it, then so do I," she insisted.

Harry turned around to look at the mother, who was standing next to what Harry guessed to be Ginny's trolley, who gave a warm, if hesitant, nod of her head. With another breath, Harry pushed forward, first with his arms and then with his legs. Before long, he was running, pushing both his trolley and the girl on top of it forward at speed. Her hair flew backwards, obscuring his vision of the barrier for a brief moment, but before he could even half second thoughts and worry about the possibility of crashing, his surroundings had changed. His trolley, and the girl on top of it, were still there, but instead of the sleek-looking diesel engines lit by natural sunlight was a scarlet-painted steam engine, warmed by something resembling candlelight. A low level of steam hung over the platform, and above it Harry could make out the clumping of red-heads from earlier. Ginny jumped off of the trolley, spared him a glance, and then rushed to meet her siblings.

With a second glance at the train, noting that the first several compartments were full, Harry turned around to where the barrier should have been and saw instead a dark iron archway, the worlds Platform Nine and Three-Quarters written across it. Harry smiled, and as he did, the mother emerged through, Ginny's trolley in tow. She gave Harry a brief, friendly smile, before making her way to where her kids were gathered.

Deciding that there couldn't be much time left until the train departed and that he really didn't want to have gotten through everything just to be stranded on the platform, Harry made his way down along it, keeping his eyes on the windows of the train compartments, looking for an empty one to sit in. Hedwig hooted at another owl, who hooted back with what sounded like indignation, and Harry overheard a boy complaining of having lost his toad, again. He decided to give Hedwig a pat through the bars her cage, glad that he didn't have to worry about losing her. She gave a gentle hoot in response and lowered her gaze.

It took Harry a while to find an empty compartment, one only being discovered near to the very end of the train. Harry stopped his trolley and made to transfer his possessions. First was Hedwig, who was easy enough to transfer into the compartment, but next was the heavy trunk containing the rest of his belongings. With a heft, a shove, a heave, and a drag, Harry managed to get it off of his trolley, over the gap between the platform, and past the first of the train doors. The steps, however, posed a challenge of another level- several attempts served only to prove that Harry was far from strong enough to complete the task. To his amazement, however, not long after a failed third attempt, the trunk began to levitate, floating upwards and then up the stairs, towards a retreating Harry, who got out of its away. Pressed against the wall, his trunk floating past him, Harry looked back out onto the platform, where the mother had her wand out and pointed in his direction. It was not too difficult to put two and two together, and Harry gave her a thankful smile and a wave, which she returned.

When the trunk was finished with its journey and was resting on the floor of the train's main corridor, Harry sat himself down, gave the mother another thankful wave, and combed his fingers up and through his messy, and now sweaty, hair, trying to draw some of it out away from his eyes. He noticed, barely, a change in the mother's expression from heartfelt to shock, but thought little of it, and just barely registered the girl walking up beside her. No, at that moment, all Harry wanted was to get his trunk out of the corridor, to sit down, and to get out of London and towards Hogwarts.

The train's whistle sounded, a warning, prompting Harry to get up and move himself and his luggage into a corner of the empty compartment in which he had left Hedwig previously. The spot by the window seemed most appealing, and so Harry took it and looked out through the glass. He could see the youngest of the red-haired boys talking animatedly to his mother, complaining about something, and the twins, accompanied by a dark-skinned boy with dreadlocks, starting to sprint down the length of the platform as a second train whistle sounded. Harry couldn't help but smile- he'd managed to get on before they did. It was comforting.

It was also fun to watch the younger boy, Ron, Harry deduced, gesture towards his stomach in an attempt to pull his mother away from the vantage point from which she was watching the train as it began to pull away from the station. It was only as the two were about to disappear from view that the mother finally turned to her son. Harry saw her reach inside a bag and pull out something he assumed to be food, but the next moment, before the boy, Ron, would presumably get the morsel, the train had rounded a corner and the platform was no longer in sight.

Harry smiled. He then began to wonder how to pass the time, and how much of it there would be to pass, when there was a knock on the compartment door. A look towards the glass barrier revealed the red-haired girl, Ginny, looking expectantly at him. Harry, realizing that he had locked the door, got up from his seat and unlocked it, allowing her in before returning to his spot. Ginny took the one next to him, and looked at Harry expectantly. "I'm Ginny. Ginny Weasley," she said.

Harry noticed that she sounded more reserved, or maybe more nervous, than earlier. "I know," he replied with as friendly a smile as he could muster. "Harry," he contorted his body to extend his hand to the girl beside him. Her eyes widened at his words, and then widened even further at the offered handshake. She took it, but only barely, before withdrawing.

"And your, um, surname?" Ginny asked.

"Potter," Harry answered.

She gave out a sound that was strongly resembled a squeak. "So Mom was right," she muttered, now doing anything but making eye contact.

Harry looked at her quizzically. "Right about what?"

"She said you had the scar, that you're Harry Potter," she continued to mutter.

The red-head's actions were rather confusing. "Last I checked," he pondered. "And nobody's ever told me otherwise."

At that, though after a long moment of silence, Ginny laughed and looked up, back at Harry with her brown eyes. It was a high-pitched, happy laugh that gave Harry a warm feeling somewhere in his chest. "Well, Harry Potter, I'm Ginny Weasley."

"As has been established," Harry gave a smile, and got one in return.

"Do you mind if I see it?" Ginny asked, looking at Harry's hair-covered forehead.

Harry pulled up his bangs to show the scar.

Ginny stared at it, almost long enough to make Harry rather uncomfortable, before gathering himself and asking another question. "Does it hurt?"

"Not really," Harry shrugged.

"Can I, can I touch it?"

Harry blinked. He strongly considered saying no, find the girl's attention to be a bit much, but the look on her face and in her eyes, a cross between embarrassment and fascination, forced his hand. "Sure, though just the once."

And so, Ginny reached out and very briefly pressed her small finger, the same one, Harry realized, with which she had tapped his shoulder, against the jagged scar before recoiling sharply and muttering an apology. "I'm so sorry, you can't possibly like this sort of thing," she once again muttered, once more looking down at her feet.

"It's okay," Harry reassured her. "Now that I think about it, I've gotten stranger reactions. Not that I understood what they actually meant at the time, mind you."

Ginny seemed to be about to ask another question when her twin brothers announced their presence just beyond the open doorway. "So Mom was right?" one of them asked.

"Yeah, I can see the scar," said the other.

"So you're Harry Potter," the first stated.

"Boy-who-lived," said the other.

"So I've been told," Harry muttered. He did not miss the look of sympathy Ginny shot at him, nor did he miss the glare she sent towards her brothers.

"Well, as thanks for your service, we'll let you alone with our sister," the first of the twins announced, sending Ginny a teasing grin as he did, garnering a brutally red blush in reponse.

"And Lee Jordan's tarantula calls," the second twin informed Ginny.

The two left as quickly as they appeared, leaving silence in their wake. Harry felt a blush burning on his cheeks from the comment from the first of the twins, and Ginny turned towards him. "I'm sorry about that."

"It's not too bad," Harry shrugged. "Just a bit strange. Not used to it."

Ginny didn't seem able to stop the question from bursting out. "So you did kill You-Know-Who?"

Harry shrugged again. "Yes, I suppose, but I can't remember any of it. Just a lot of green light. So your whole family is wizards?" he pushed, eager to change the topic to something more interesting.

"My Mom and I are witches," Ginny glared, "but yeah, we're all magic."

"That has to be loads of fun, right? Growing up all around magic? I really wish I got to grow up in a family like that, four brothers, magic. My aunt and uncle are horrible. They hate magic."

"Six brothers, actually. Percy and Fred and George, they're the ones attending right now. Ron's the younger- he'll be going to Hogwarts next year. But Bill and Charlie have already graduated. One works for Gringotts, the other with dragons!" Ginny blurted out, her excitement evident.

"Dragons? Wait, six brothers?" Harry asked, feeling a bit mortified. He had to imagine that it wasn't the greatest, being the only sister of six brothers. Not as bad as Dudley, probably, certainly not as bad as six Dudleys. Harry physically shivered at the thought, earning a raised eyebrow from Ginny.

"It's pretty horrible, yes," she stated, nonchalantly. "Though I get the feeling that you had it worse."

Harry laughed a dry, relaxing laugh. "Probably. My cousin is just awful. He really likes to hit things."

"Even you?" Ginny asked. Now, her tone sounded a bit different to Harry's ears, but he shrugged it off.

"When he could manage to catch me. But I'm pretty fast, so that wasn't often."

Ginny only nodded in response. For several minutes, the two just sat in silence. Harry watched out the window as the buildings grew shorter and shorter and eventually disappeared entirely, leaving in their wake nothing but rolling fields of grass, cows, and sheep. Ginny watched him.

"Don't worry about being the worst in the class, or anything," she finally said, breaking the silence.

"What?" Harry responded, pulling his cheek from its spot pressed against the window pane.

"Mom told me to tell you that you'll probably be worrying that you don't know anything, and to tell you that when she went to school, some of the best students were muggleborn."

How she'd guessed what he had been thinking, Harry would never know. But, what she said felt nonetheless good to hear. "You're probably right. I mean, my mom was muggleborn, right? And Hagrid seemed to think she was good at magic."

Ginny just smiled that bright smile of hers and reached out to give him a gentle pat on his shoulder. It comforted him more than any words could.

For several more minutes after that, the two sat in a further comfortable silence, it persisting until a commotion of clattering came from the corridor and attracted the immediate attention of both Harry and Ginny, followed by the entrance of a woman who appeared very intent on handing out treats. Harry saw Ginny gazing wistfully at the cart, looking very much like she wanted to buy it all, and so he jumped from his seat, ready to buy himself and her most of everything.

"How much can I get for a galleon?" he asked the confectioner, whose responding smile was wide enough cross an ocean.

It was when Harry returned to his spot by the window and next to Ginny, however, that the red-headed girl herself grew a smile. This one, much Harry's dismay, was much less genial and much more mischievous.

With both arms, Ginny pushed him across the compartment as he tried to sit down. In the process, Harry dropped all of the assorted candies and treats that he had been carrying, leaving them for Ginny to easily gather and secure. When he finally managed to gather himself on the opposite row of seats, Harry saw that Ginny had pulled out her wand, a sleek and pretty looking thing which she was soon pointing at him. "Go get yours out of your trunk, Potter," she ordered, cheerily.

Uneased, Harry did as he was told and sat down in the seat opposite Ginny, then shooting at her as nasty a glare as he could manage. He was very much hungry, and she had just taken all of his food, which he had been intending to share. "Now, here's what we're going to do. I've read some stuff, and Fred and George taught me a couple spells. I'll going to teach them to you," she said with a smile. "Show you that you really can do this stuff."

"Why'd you have to push me, then?" Harry replied, a little angry, but mostly confused.

"I needed to get a hold of this stuff," Ginny shrugged, very clearly putting on a show, and enjoying it. She opened up one of the boxes of jelly beans and pulled a handful out. She picked a few out, and ate them one by one, and tossed the rest over to Harry. Their colors were a bit strange, but he was very hungry, so he tossed them all in his mouth. Immediately after the first bite, he recoiled, the abhorrent tastes of earwax, sour milk, and rotten egg ambushing his tongue. Harry shot Ginny a look of betrayal, who waved her hand in response. "Every flavored beans, Harry," she casually explained, "I wasn't going to eat those, and who'd want to let food go to waste?"

"Now," Ginny continued without pause, "I'm going to toss you another, a good one, and you're going to make it a lot bigger." The witch did as she said she was going to, and Harry found himself looking at an oily black candy in the palm of his non-wand holding hand.

"How am I going to make it bigger?" Harry asked.

"The engorgement charm," Ginny beamed. "Fred and George used it on Ron's nose last week, while he was sleeping. Even Dad couldn't stop laughing when he came downstairs."

Ginny then set about explaining the word for the spell, _engorgio_ , she claimed, and the mostly circular hand movement required. In demonstration, she placed a jelly bean of her own on the seat next to hers. It took her, much to Harry's relief, three attempts to get the charm working right, the first attempt producing nothing, the second producing a brief flash of blue light followed by a less brief and mostly fruitless discussion, at Harry's questioning, of what it meant to actually do magic, and only the third resulting on Ginny enlarging the small candy into the size of an apple. Harry watched in amazement as she treated it accordingly, lifting the treat to her mouth and tearing a chunk out of it.

"Now you go," Ginny prodded. Harry did as she had, and put the black bean on the seat beside him. He said the word, _engorgio_ , exactly as Ginny had, and he did the wand movement, but nothing happened. He tried again, and then a third time, with nothing happening. After the fourth attempt resulted in no blue light and no larger a jelly bean, Harry threw himself back in frustration.

"I can't do it," he complained to Ginny, who had a thoughtful expression on her face.

"Do you want to do the magic, or do you want to make the bean bigger?" she asked.

"What does that matter?" Harry asked.

Ginny looked to be on the verge of answering when another voice, not much different from hers, came in from the hallway. "Oh, intent is really important when casting spells. I was taking notes from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade One, and it mentioned this in some of the theory, that it's really very important to truly want to cast spell you're casting. It said that it doesn't always hold true, like when spells misfire, but for a wizard to properly channel his magic, it's generally good to truly know and understand what it is you're trying to do!"

Both Harry and Ginny simply stared at the girl now standing in the open doorway to their compartment. She was smiling, showing off a pair of very prominent front teeth, and her bushy brown hair was disheveled. In her eyes, however, there was an incredible amount of excitement.

"What?" was all Harry could manage out.

"I'm Hermione Granger," the girl said with her hand outstretched, "I'm trying to find a toad, Neville's lost his, have you seen it? And yes, I couldn't help but see that you're trying to do magic, and overhear what you," she looked at Ginny, "were saying," she beamed.

"So, answer my question, Potter," Ginny continued. Harry noticed a flash go across Hermione's face as he looked from her to the redhead sitting across from him. "Like, are you just trying to cast the spell to cast the spell, or are you trying to make the bean bigger?"

Harry nodded, declining to verbally answer Ginny's question, and with determined nods to both Ginny and this new girl, Hermione, returned his focus to the candy. " _Engorgio_ ," he stated, very firmly, performing the wand movement as well as he could manage and thinking very hard of how great it would be to see the bean grow, to show that he could do it. To his immense relief as well as satisfaction, the circle of blue light that Ginny had managed to produce before came out from his own wand, and the jelly bean within began to grow. It shook and wobbled and at times looked like it was about to tear itself apart, but eventually it reached the apple-size that Ginny had managed, and Harry pulled back his wand.

Hermione started clapping and sat herself down next to Ginny, letting the other girl know that she wanted a jelly bean of her own to try. Meanwhile, Harry picked up his jelly bean, gave Ginny a wink, and bit into it as though it were an apple, just as she had. His first reaction was that the flavor had to be something he'd never had before, something oily and rich, a bit fishy, and very strange. His second reaction was that it was a pretty weak flavor, as if watered down. He commented on this, to which Ginny just shrugged, while the bushy-haired new arrival looked up from her almost-started attempt of her own. "The engorgement was probably imperfect. I read that you have to be very precise when doing this sort of stuff with food," Hermione lectured.

The bushy-haired intruder then did as Ginny and Harry had mad managed to do, except she was able to get the spell to work on the first attempt. Her bean, of a very dark brown color, had grown even larger, and quite a bit more smoothly, than Harry's own attempt. Hermione examined the candy for a moment, and then bit into it enthusiastically. Immediately, she recoiled, looking at the candy with betrayal etched across her features. "It tastes like mud!" she exclaimed.

"Are you surprised? It's every flavor beans, Granger," Ginny drawled. "You're just lucky that brown was just mud. Believe me, it could have been much worse."

Harry laughed, and nodded as Hermione looked at him with horror. "Why would anybody make candy like that?" she questioned, and then turned on Ginny. "You gave me that one specifically, didn't you?" A hint of hurt was there to be heard in her tone.

"Might have been chocolate," Ginny shrugged.

"Speaking of chocolate," Harry started, "Ginny, toss me one of those chocolate frog things. Looks interesting."

She did as Harry asked, picking one out for herself. With a tentative glance towards Harry, which he answered with a smile and a nod, Hermione, too, reached out and grabbed something, though Harry was too focused on his candy to see exactly what. The frog that had been previously contained within the packaging had gotten free and begun jumping around the room. As Hermione bit into was seemed like some sort of pastry, or small cake, and Ginny bit into the head of her frog while reading whatever it was on the packaging, Harry was forced to try and catch his. He had to get out of his seat and jump around, much as the frog was doing, but, eventually, he managed to get the animated chocolate into his grasp. Harry looked up and met Ginny's gaze as he settled back into his new seat, the redhead having given her container to Hermione for the girl to read as she finished with what Harry now saw to be a cauldron cake.

"Engorge that bugger, Harry," Ginny encouraged him, a wild look in her eyes. Harry noticed that Hermione responded to that, her eyes drawn to his forehead. He might have felt something about the attention under different circumstances, but as it was, he was too focused on holding down the charmed chocolate to give the bushy haired girl much thought. He had more success on the frog than he had on the bean, and was soon holding an engorged piece of chocolate much like a Bond villain would hold a cat.

Ginny giggled and opened up another pack of every flavor beans, having already finished with the first one. "Having fun reading those, Hermione?" she questioned the witch beside her, who had since finished with the cauldron cake and begun tearing through several packs of chocolate frogs. She, Harry noticed with some resentment, had, like Ginny, not had close to as much trouble as he did keeping the sweet beasts under control.

"Reading what?" Harry asked.

"Chocolate frogs come with collectible cards- Ron loves them. They've got famous witches and wizards, and some short biography about them," Ginny explained.

"Some of these really are fascinating," Hermione added. "Though you'd think they could into a bit more detail on some," she frowned.

"Who was on yours, Harry?" Ginny asked, grimacing as she immediately afterwards ate a misjudged bean.

Harry lifted the hand he'd been using to pet his engorged frog and used it to grab the card that he'd discarded to the empty seat next to his. "It's Dumbledore!" he exclaimed. "Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon's blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling," he read.

"Alchemy?" Ginny asked, a weird look on her face. "Dumbledore's an alchemist? Dad was just saying how you don't see many of them around these days. Do you think he'd teach me?"

"I don't know," Harry shrugged. He really had no idea.

"Upper years can sometimes take it as an elective," Hermione noted. "It says so in Hogwarts, a History."

The conversation continued as the three eleven-year olds tore through the mound of candy between them, progressing from the brief mention of alchemy to a longer discussion of gold, then to a much lengthier discussion of what they thought Hogwarts would be like, and finally turning to some sport called quidditch, about which Ginny spoke with a startling passion. That lead to a discussion of the school's houses, which in turn led to each of the three deciding that, yes, Gryffindor was most certainly the best of the four.

That discussion, however, was truncated a bit early by the arrival of a pudgy-faced boy in the doorway. "Trevor!" he exclaimed, moving forward briefly before realizing that the toad-shaped mass still being petted in Harry's arms was just a very large chocolate frog. Harry simply shrugged at the confusion, and at long last took a bit out of the creature, but Hermione, he noticed, looked mortified.

"Oh, I'm so sorry Neville, I know I was supposed to be trying to help you find your toad but then I just saw Harry and Ginny here trying to do some magic and it just looked so interesting and I got caught up in it all and we talked and oh Neville I'm sorry," she spilled out, for which Ginny gave her a very weird look, seemingly mindful that only Harry see it.

Hermione and Neville talked briefly, about what Harry cared little, and then the pudgy boy left, leaving Hermione standing in the doorway. "It's getting dark outside, you know, we'll be getting there soon. You two had better change into your school robes, I'm going to go get into mine and then help out Neville. He's lost his toad."

With that, she left, leaving nothing behind in her wake. Harry and Ginny laughed with each other and separated, briefly, to change into their school robes. Ginny went off down the train to wherever it was that she had left her trunk, and Harry stayed in his compartment. It was a bit bothersome, having to maneuver around the various wrappers and containers leftover from the candied feast, but, even with several stumbles slowing him down, Harry managed to get into his full school attire by the time Ginny returned.

The moment she had, a voice, sounding much clearer than any intercom system, rung out from seemingly nowhere. "We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes' time. Please leave your luggage on the train, it will be taken to the school separately," it announced.

Harry looked at his luggage, Hedwig, her cage, and the very heavy trunk, and gave off a sigh of relief that caught a look from Ginny. "Your mom had to levitate it up the steps for me," he explained. "I don't suppose you can do that?"

Ginny shook her head, a friendly smile on her face. "You nervous?" she asked.

Harry took a moment to consider the question. "Not as much as I could be," he decided.

A comfortable silence settled over the two then, not being broken by either even after the train had come to a complete stop. Neither Harry nor Ginny said even a single word as they filed, Ginny in the lead, out, first into the corridor, then down the short set of steps, and then, finally, onto a barely lit platform along with the rest of the students, some of whom were looking around trying to find someone, some of whom were trying to force their way through the crowd towards some destination, and some of whom were chatting animatedly with friends, carrying on with conversations started on the train.

Ginny's elbow broke Harry's reverie, jabbing into his side to gain his attention. "Look," she pointed towards a familiar-looking silver-blond haired boy whose face was suffering from a severe outbreak of boils. "You think someone hexed him?"

"Someone hexed him," a third, masculine voice emerged from somewhere close behind Harry.

"I'm someone," admitted a fourth, very similar to the third. "We were in the compartment across from him, see, and he was sounding annoying. Then he said that he wanted to introduce himself to Harry Potter, and, well, I'd promised to leave you alone with my sister, didn't I?"

The twins once again disappeared as quickly as they had arrived, leaving Harry quite confused and Ginny with a very annoyed expression covering her features. "Don't let them bother you," a red-haired boy with a large P on his chest said, evidently not having heard the admission. "Hagrid should be here soon to take you first years to the castle. And good luck, Ginny, with the sorting."

"Thanks, Percy," Ginny murmured to the now-departing prefect, whom Harry then recognized as the oldest of her brothers from the station.

Then, a booming voice that Harry immediately recognized as Hagrid's cut through the lightening chatter. "Firs' years, firs' years, over here! All right there, Harry?"

Ginny cast a curious look at Harry for the directed acknowledgement of him by the giant of a man, and then the two fell in line with all the other first years, following after a bobbing lamp that, soon enough, led them to a lake shore and the small fleet of boats stationed there. Four to a boat, the instruction was, and so Harry and Ginny soon found themselves sharing space with two other girls whose names Harry did not know as they sat and watched as they and the rest of the fleet glided silently across perfectly still water, moving ever closer towards the gargantuan mass of walls, turrets, and towers that loomed high above.


	2. A Most Painful Death

Ginny could see Harry, there, sitting at the Gryffindor table, his face coated in a very red and, she had to admit, Weasley-like blush as he talked with Fred and George, the boys who had given him said blush with their very loud and boisterous brags regarding his destination. She smiled, just a little, at their antics, with only Harry's obvious embarrassment preventing her from breaking out into full-blown laughter, or at the very least a much wider smile. Fortunately, however, Harry's embarrassment seemed to disappear rather quickly as he finished up his exchange with Fred and George and he started to look up towards and observe the high table, gazing at some point just beyond the sorting hat. Ginny did as he did but, instead of feeling the fascination and interest directed at the teachers that Harry just exuded, she could only feel the sensation of her stomach dropping like an anchor at the sight of the judgmental cap.

She was almost too distracted by the feeling that a flying car had slammed squarely into her gut to register the admittance of one boy to Gryffindor, and that of the girl after him into Ravenclaw. Turpin had seemed nice, having said a few brief comforting words to Ginny, and now seemed very pleased with her placement, and Ginny was forced to wonder just how awful Fred and George would be if that piece of headwear put her into Hufflepuff, or just how disappointed Mom and Dad would be if, even worse, it put her into Slytherin.

"Weasley, Ginevra," Professor McGonagall called out, and Ginny felt her legs moving, forcing her forwards without any input from herself. The hat was just there, right in front of her and looming ever closer, but Ginny couldn't look at it and instead forced her gaze upwards, an action that, much to Ginny's horror, had her making eye contact with a man who could only be Dumbledore, what with where he was sat at the middle of the high table and how he was dressed in eccentric robes and half-moon glasses, and his age and really just the whole aura he had about him. The Headmaster smiled back, causing any and every ounce of color that may have previously remained on Ginny's face to drain away and disappear completely. She felt her eyes widen, uncontrollably, much like the movement her legs.

In the few seconds it had taken to get from where she had been standing to the stool on which the sorting hat rested, Ginny had made a fool of herself, and everyone was judging her for it, she just knew, she was _certain_.

The stool, though, was not uncomfortable, she forced herself to think as the hat was forced onto her scalp. "Yes, it is quite a nice stool, I agree," a voice said in Ginny's ear. It was all she could do not to jump at it. "But I'm not here to sort stools- but wouldn't that be nice? Much easier than sorting children, I bet. Stool's aren't complicated, see? They're stools. But Children? You lot are very complicated, except for those times when you're not."

At that, Ginny felt herself laugh, and was able to register a soft murmuring that momentarily rustled through the hall in front of her. "And this is exactly what I'm talking about!" the hat's voice exclaimed. "Here I was, thinking, oh boy, a Weasley, this one will be easy, to Gryffindor it is, but, well…"

The hat's voice trailed off in thought, and Ginny, somehow, began to grow even more nervous. It wasn't going to put her in Gryffindor? Fred and George, she knew, would never let her hear the end of it. And, even worse, she had to have been up there for at least as long as Harry had, at this point. "Harry Potter, hmm?" the hat questioned. "Oh, yes, he was another bothersome one. He really wanted to be in Gryffindor, kept on asking for it. 'Please Gryffindor, please Gryffindor', he said. And now I take it that you're the reason for it? Well, it's not as though it'd be a bad place for you even if it might not be the best or as though you wouldn't fit in, and it'd be quite a shame to let Potter's efforts go to waste, no?"

"Gryffindor!" the hat roared, not to her but to the crowd, and Ginny was unable to keep herself from skipping over to the Gryffindor table, to where Harry was furiously clapping and Fred and George were building up volume in an uproar. Ginny took an open spot next to Harry, just recently opened up for her by Percy, who gave her a subdued yet heartfelt pat on her back as he got up and moved to the next seat over on Harry's side, and could not care less as some boy named Blaise was sorted into Slytherin. She was just watching Harry as he looked at her, relief in his eyes, and felt something cheery bubble up inside of her.

Which wouldn't do, so, before the cheers and jubilation for Zabini from the Slytherin table had subsided, she leaned over to Harry, to the point where her lips were almost touching his ear. "The hat tells me that you were just begging to be put here," she teased.

Harry blushed and looked away. Whatever would have happened next, didn't, as the Headmaster rose from his chair, held his arms out wide, and began to speak. The whole of the hall got silent in response. "Welcome, welcome all, to a new year, and to some your first year, at Hogwarts! Before we begin with our feast, I would like to say a few words. Okay, there, I've said a few words. Thank you for listening!"

The Headmaster sat back down as all of the students in the hall, Ginny very much included, clapped, cheered, and laughed in response.

"Is he mad?" Ginny heard Harry ask Percy over her, and she turned around to see an expression of utmost confusion on his face.

"He's a genius, Harry!" Percy endorsed. "Though, yes, he might just be a bit mad. Hand me that chicken over there, would you?"

Harry's furthered confusion, and increased amazement, at the whole situation once he realized that there suddenly existed a whole lot of food where previously there had been none made Ginny want to reassure him. "He's not mad, Potter," she leaned over just as she had to tease him, "the man just knows how to control a room."

At that, Harry seemed mostly satisfied regarding the sanity of his Headmaster. Ginny reached across the table and grabbed two somewhat cliché hambones, handed one to Harry while keeping the other for herself, and began to eat. Harry grabbed more food to eat off the bat than, grabbing at the chicken thighs and the cuts of steak and the puddings and both the roasted and fried potatoes, clearly very intent on getting some of everything, so much so that Ginny had come close to finishing with her hambone by the time he was just getting started on everything. She put off a question she had for a little while, electing to let the boy eat a bit, but soon she just had to get it out. "What house did the hat want to put you in?" she asked.

Harry took a moment to swallow his food before answering. "What makes you think it was thinking of any other house."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "You were up there for a while, Harry. And, remember, it told me you were begging for this one."

"That Hermione girl had gotten in here, and we'd talked about it, and, well, I knew you were going to be here too," he explained, and Ginny felt her stomach drop. She may not have gotten into Gryffindor; Harry's begging seemed to have helped her case, even.

Ginny noticed the Hermione girl beam, and then blush a little bit, as she evidently overheard Harry's explanation, but gave it little mind, at the moment. "Doesn't answer my question, Potter," she said as dismissively as she could, trying to feign some disinterest.

Harry took a bit from one of his puddings. "Slytherin, said I'd do well there," he admitted.

"Oh," Ginny made herself give him a smile, "don't worry, I'm pretty sure he wanted to put me there, too."

Perhaps she had said it a bit too loudly, or Fred and George had just been listening in, but Fred gave an exaggerated gasp at her words. "Our baby sister, a Slytherin?" he said to George.

"I must say, Fred, that would be quite the cause for alarm. Mom and Dad would have been just horrified. Say, they probably wouldn't even be happy that Ginny spent so long up there."

"Knock it off, you two," Percy sniffed, earning much gratitude from Ginny and an admiring look from Harry. "You wouldn't remember, but the hat took a little bit of time with me. Thought there was a good chance I should be in Ravenclaw," he said, between small bites of potato.

"Ravenclaw's not Slytherin, Percy," George pointed out.

"One's full of clever people, the other's just full of dicks," Fred observed.

"The hat was thinking about putting me there, too," Harry pointed out, softly, coming to Ginny's defense. At that, Fred and George looked hesitant, apparently not having heard Harry's earlier admission of the fact.

"Well, maybe the two of you would have been good for it," George now assuaged.

"Yeah," Fred said, his mouth full of some sort of food. "I bet that hat is a really good schemer, was thinking about using the two of you to clean that dungeon up."

"But then it decided that it wouldn't be fair to you two good blokes, though, to make you deal with actual Slytherins all the time," George added on.

Ginny just threw her now-barren hambone at George's head, and was greatly disappointed when Fred caught it, saving George, who hadn't even flinched, from harm. George, much to Ginny's surprise, then threw the bone back at her, and, as if imitating the exchange from seconds before, Harry reached out and caught the twirling bone from the air just in front of Ginny's nose. Before she could take it from him and launch it back, however, Percy had gotten his wand out and transfigured the makeshift weapon into a very pretty butterfly, which then just flapped its wings and flew away from Harry's hand, which was still hovering right there in front of Ginny's face.

"Honestly, Fred, don't throw things at your sister," Percy scolded before turning back to his meal, and beginning a conversation with the girl sitting across the table.

"Yes, Mom," Fred replied. "Nice catch, though, Harry. I thought I threw it pretty hard. Didn't I, Fred?"

"Much harder than Ginny did," Fred affirmed, earning himself some ire.

"Maybe you've got some good seeker instincts in you," George said, sagely.

Ginny nudged Harry and gave him a thankful smile, which he returned with a blush and a glance down at his feet. After that exchange, the ate with each other, in silence, simply sitting back and enjoying listening into Fred and George's stories and antics, overhearing Hermione talking at a disinterested older boy about what she expected classes to be like, and watching Percy trying ever so unsubtly attempt to flirt with the girl to whom he'd earlier turned his attention.

Then, a ghost in attire that looked quite outdated popped up from behind. "I could not help but overhear you two talking earlier, about the sorting," it said and then stopped, obviously waiting for a reply. When he got none beyond Harry looking startled and Ginny feeling very annoyed at his interruption, the ghost continued. "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, not at all. Honestly, the whole system isn't that great, believe me, and the hat did put you here, didn't it? I'm sure you two will do just great here in Gryffindor- if I may say so myself, it is the best of the houses."

"Not that I disagree," Hermione interjected in a stammer from far away, "but you're Nearly Headless Nick, aren't you? You're not exactly unbiased."

"Well, yes I am, and yes, I'm not, but still…" Nick trailed off before picking up again. "Being biased does not mean that I am wrong, no?"

Hermione seemed to consider this, but not before the Irish boy across from her had spoken up. "Nearly Headless? How can you be nearly headless?"

Without a word, the ghost raised his left arm to his left ear and gave it a very hard yank. Like a door moving on its hinges, his head and neck went along in the direction of the yank, and Ginny was able to see ghostly viscera and his severed spine where his neck had earlier covered. A follow up glance at the remnants of the blood pudding on her plate left her without much of an appetite. She imagined trying to behead someone, and almost succeeding but not being able to get through that last bit of flesh, and then being too lazy to finish the job. Though Nick was dead anyway- it didn't, she decided, matter much in either way whether the whole of the neck was cut or just most of it.

"Why'd someone want to cut your head off?" Harry asked the ghost.

"Oh, it's not really something I care to discuss," he replied, either regret or shame resident in his tone. Harry seemed to decide to let the topic rest.

Nearly Headless Nick took the cue and started talking about the house championship, encouraged by the rapt attention he was receiving from all the first years, Ginny herself included. She found herself debating its merits. On the one hand, it did not seem as though there was anything actually real to gain from being a member of the winning house; on the other hand, she imagined that it would probably be quite satisfying to be the one to take it away from the Slytherins. She'd not liked the looks of any of the kids that had been sorted into that house, and her older brothers never had anything good to say about them, ever. A look up at the greasy-haired, sallow-faced, and hook-nosed man with a seemingly permanent sneer on his lips whom she understood to be their Head of House only reaffirmed her suspicion that, yes, it would be great to stop the Slytherins from winning it.

As the dinner foods, the wide assortment of meats and such, disappeared from the table without much warning, only to be replaced by an even more wide assortment of deserts- rice pudding, treacle tarts, chocolate cakes, lemon candies, and so forth, Ginny began to listen in on Harry's conversation with Neville, the round-ish boy who'd lost his toad on the train, and Hermione, whom Ginny had grown a little bit fond of, even despite her being more than a touch weird and more than acceptably enthusiastic about more or less everything.

"Looking back on things," Harry was explaining, "I did do a decent amount of magic. I remember, this one time, I was being chased by my cousin and his friends, and then, just, I was up on the school roof. Didn't remember climbing up there, or even jumping, but there I was."

"Why were they chasing you?" Neville asked.

Harry shrugged and took a bite from one of the slices of pie he'd brought unto his plate. "It was just a game they liked to play. Harry Hunting, they called it."

"What'd they do when they caught you?" Neville followed up, his eyes wide.

"Hit me, when they could. But they didn't catch me much," Harry once again shrugged and took another bite.

Hermione, for her part, looked absolutely aghast, and Ginny found herself agreeing with the bushy-haired witch. "That's horrible!" Hermione exclaimed.

"I suppose it might have been, if Dudley weren't quite so slow," Harry acknowledged. He seemed eager to change the topic. "What about you, Neville? What sort of magic did you do?"

Hermione looked as though she found the forced shift in the topic to be very objectionable, but she couldn't get a word in edgewise as Neville took the opportunity to talk about he was dropped on his head as a child. He did bounce, or he at least claimed as much. It was a touching story, really, it was, enough so that Hermione's scattered tales of her own childhood magic dulled in comparison. "Now that I think about it," she said at some point, "there was this one time when…"

Ginny found herself feeling not tired, but exhausted, drained, at all of what was going on. Her stomach was full, the lighting of the hall was warm and so was its temperature, and the night sky above was dark and inviting- all things taken together, Ginevra Weasley started to long for bed. A look to Harry, which took substantial effort, revealed to her that he was likely feeling much the same way, although the dark-haired, very kind boy was nonetheless doing his best to give his attention to the girl whose stories had lost zero enthusiasm. Ginny, having long-since zoned out, was soon joined in her realm of disinterested drowsiness by Harry, and the two sat there for quite a while, heads down, eyes looking nowhere in particular.

"Don't you two fall asleep on us," came George's voice.

"I'm not carrying either of you to the tower," Fred complained.

Ginny looked up to see the twins return to what they'd been doing before, and then felt Percy's hand soft and firm against her upper back, reaching across Harry to give her a reassuring pat. "Dumbledore will have some things to say soon, and then it'll be off to bed."

Harry, Ginny noticed, flinched in pain a few seconds later and clapped his right hand over his forehead. Ginny, in response, gave him an appraising, and questioning look, and Percy, looking concerned, asked what had happened.

"Nothing," Harry denied, earning as caustic a glare from Ginny as she could manage. He shrunk back from it. "Really, it's nothing, my scar just hurt, briefly. It's nothing."

Percy seemed satisfied, and turned away, leaving Harry solely to Ginny, who, in turn, was not satisfied. She contemplated pushing Harry even more, but decided against it. She was much too tired, and, less importantly, Harry really did not look like he wanted to go into any more detail.

The whole crisis was negated when Dumbledore, at long last, stood up to speak again. "Now that all of our hungers and thirsts have been met- or, at least, so I'd hope, I do have some real things to say, that you'd be well-served if you paid good attention to. First years, and I daresay some of our older students," Ginny noticed his eyes flashing towards her brothers, "would be wise to remember that the Forbidden Forest is indeed forbidden, and remains that way for several very good reasons."

Dumbledore paused. "As Mr. Filch was eager to remind me, the use of magic in the corridors between classes is discouraged. Additionally, quidditch trials will be held soon and any hopeful players should make contact with the captain of their house team to discover exactly when. Personally, I would advise the next week."

"As a fourth point," Dumbledore kept on in his cheerful way, "I'm afraid I must insist that students refrain from hexing one another," he said, and Ginny was sure he looked at each of Fred, George, and the obnoxious-looking Slytherin boy they had indeed hexed, who had on his face an expression of both extreme embarrassment and extreme loathing. Ginny doubted that he knew that it was one of the twins who had hexed him, and had managed to get his afflicted face cleared up before the sorting, but Dumbledore, evidently, had nevertheless been made aware of the situation. "Madame Pomfrey most often has too much to deal with on her hands without the students actively afflicting each other with dreadfully large boils."

The atmosphere then got very, very serious. Ginny could have sworn that the temperature dropped at least a handful of degrees. "Finally, and most importantly, I regret to inform you that the third-floor corridor, on the right-hand side, is off-limits, and should be considered out of bounds by any of you who do not wish to die a most painful death."

Behind Ginny, Harry laughed, one of the few students in the hall to do so. Across from Ginny, her brothers took on a look of incredible interest, albeit one that burned out and was replaced very rapidly as Dumbledore progressed and called for all in the hall to sing the school's song. While almost everyone else seemed willing to only briefly wonder why exactly a school hallway was to be closed off citing a high risk of painful fatality, Ginny found herself debating whether or not to go search out the answer. Either something too dangerous for the staff to handle had been contained in that corridor, or something was being kept within, something that warranted dangerous protection.

Harry seemed a bit interested himself, with a few hushed words to Percy and a contemplative look towards the front table, but on the whole he looked to be happy with listening to the rest of the school, particularly those two embarrassing creatures that had long claimed to be Ginny's twin brothers, sing. Hopefully, Ginny thought, she would be able to live down the funeral singing of her brothers, and maybe, just maybe, get a good look at what promised a most painful death.


	3. Her First Morning

It was only when Ginny already had one foot fully through the portrait hole that she realized that she must have left her wand behind in the dormitory, as it was nowhere to be found anywhere in the folds of her school robes. With a scowl and a short parting word to her dorm mates with whom she'd been travelling to breakfast, Ginny turned on her back heel and reentered the Gryffindor common room. With its abundance of low-laying tables and plush armchairs, the large chamber was playing host to a small collection of upper-years, all of whom seemed very uninterested in hurrying to start with the first day of the new school year. Several watched curiously as the red-haired first year girl weaved as deftly as she could through the maze of furniture and lounging students on her way back to the dormitories. Ginny didn't know what they were thinking, or what they thought of her, or if they even did, and really didn't want to care, so, with a slight roll of her eyes, she brushed off their attentions completely, determined to get her wand and get down to breakfast, and her class schedule, as quickly as possible.

The dorm was empty, of course, Ginny having been with all five of the other girls before realizing that she hadn't had wand. They, she thought to herself as she began to rummage through one of her drawers, were all nice enough, though, judging by the previous night as the group all prepared to spend their first night at the castle, Hermione was somehow a distracting bore, Parvati never said much of anything worth listening to, and only Lavender was really capable of holding something resembling an interesting conversation, as evidenced by the five minutes Ginny had spent with her in front of the bathroom mirrors earlier in the morning.

Her wand was, as she found out after spending several minutes looking through her trunk, her drawers, and her sheets, down on the carpet, nestled in the gap between her four-poster bed and the nightstand snuggled up next to it. It was far back, against the wall, and the crevice was too narrow for Ginny to reach her arm through, forcing her to try to drag the nightstand out from where it was. At first, it glided smoothly enough, but then, somewhere along its broad base, it snagged against the carpet and tilted in Ginny's direction, away from the wall. The jolt from the snag caused Ginny to lose her balance, stumble, and then fall backwards, her strength on the far end of the nightstand enough to bring it down with her. It slammed on top of her, hard, the top edge falling square into her gut, forcing out all of the wind within. While it wasn't too painful, it wasn't painless either, and a fair amount of further discomfort was added by an inkwell that had been resting on top of the nightstand being flung by the fall and smacking Ginny right between her eyes. Luckily, it didn't shatter, instead bouncing away somewhere Ginny wasn't looking. The pain from the nightstand pressing into her just below her ribs didn't do much beyond simply angering the girl, who heard her throat unleash out something resembling the screech from a particularly angry banshee.

Her back flat against the floor but her arms free, Ginny tried to push the nightstand off of herself, now even more than before regretting having put her schoolbooks into it while unpacking the night before. It was heavy, much too heavy, and the fraction of an inch that Ginny managed to raise the edge served only to cause a second, smaller wallop to her gut when the muscles in her arms gave out and let it drop back down. When Ginny managed to regain her breath for a second time, she mustered all of her strength, and screamed out a single, very loud "Help!".

The minute that followed informed Ginny that nobody was coming. Her eyes saw nobody enter through the doorway and her ears heard the silence of noone travelling up or down the stairs beyond. Considering that her dormmates had all gone ahead when she had to turn back, that they had all taken a while to get going and thus were almost certainly the last of all the Gryffindor girls to head out, and that all of the upper years in the common room were both probably too far away to hear and, more significantly, boys who thus, according to the assurances of Percy, couldn't get into the girls' dormitory even if they had heard and wanted to help, Ginny felt herself growing a bit hopeless. She had spent many days over the summer dreaming of how her first day at Hogwarts would go, and being trapped under a nightstand and missing all of her classes was really not among the ways in which she had wished it would.

Matters were only worsened by the hunger pang that soon shot through her stomach. Of course, she thought, it wouldn't be enough just to be trapped under a very heavy object- she would have to go through it on a stomach devoid of breakfast. Ginny harrumphed, tried again to push away the nightstand, and failed. She tried to wiggle free, to scoot or slide along the carpet, but the mass on top of her was too much, and she was pinned. Ginny's efforts causing a lock of her red hair to fall down into her mouth. She exhaled hard to force away the crimson strands, an act which seemed to cause her left thigh to start cramping, for whatever reason. Her legs were bowed, straddling underneath the fallen furniture in a very uncomfortable position, and the new, roaring cramp was not helping the situation.

Ginny strained her neck to look at her cramping leg, to little result, and then looked over at the leg of hers that was not hurting. Just beyond her foot, she saw, was her wand, still laying where it had been before the nightstand had fallen over, up against the wall. An idea quickly arriving in her head, Ginny extended her leg to try and reach her wand. It took some stretching and some shifting, but she soon had the toe of her shoe pressing the length of wood against the wall, trying to shimmy it upwards. Realizing that even if she succeeded, she likely wouldn't be able to get the wand into her hand, Ginny stopped her efforts, lifted her foot, pressed the heel of the shoe into the wall and so managed to get it off of her foot. Kicking it away, Ginny once again located her wand and this time wrapped it between the curled toes and ball of her foot.

With her wand in a firm grasp, Ginny considered what to do next. At first, she thought she would try to flick foot backwards and so get her wand into her hands, so she could then attempt to cast one spell or another. It was a tempting idea, but the chance of the attempt going wrong, of sending her wand too far away, was too great. If she mucked it up, she'd be up a creek without a paddle. Or pinned beneath a nightstand without a wand, she thought to herself. So, she came up with a different idea.

Ginny's mother had been levitating pots and pans for as long back as Ginny could remember. She couldn't remember her mother ever saying the incantation for it, a factor that Ginny understood to be at least somewhat important, but she was able to conjure up an image in her mind's eye of her mother making the motions with her own wand. Ginny did what she could to imitate her memories, except with her own foot replacing her mother's hand in holding and pointing the wand. Nothing happened, and Ginny almost lost the hold she had on her wand when, in response, she kicked the wall in anger. She tried the motion again, gliding her foot through the air and then following up a bit of a twitch, once again not achieving any resort.

Maybe, Ginny thought, only a hand could use a wand. Or, a snarky voice in her head lectured her, one actually needed to know a spell if she wanted to use.

The inexperienced witch tried a third time, this time making a guess at a word, "levitatum", that she hoped to be the correct one for the spell. The third attempt failed just as much as the first two had, although a small spattering of blueish sparks leaked out of Ginny's wand as she finished saying her guess. The sparks, much to her disappointment, dissipated into the air, failing to set the wood of the nightstand on fire. Maybe, Ginny thought, if they had started a blaze, a teacher would have been alerted by some sort of magic and called to help.

Such an idea quickly came to disturb the young girl. Perhaps the only thing that, at the moment, she wanted more than to escape from her current situation was for absolutely nobody to find her in it. Except Harry, or maybe Percy; she supposed neither would be too awful about it, Percy especially. Nonetheless, the thought of being found, even by those two, spurred Ginny to try to levitate the nightstand a fourth time.

"Get off of me you bloody thing", Ginny snarled, as she imitated the motions from her memories, not expecting anything to come of it. Without meaning to, she tapped the tip of her wand against the nightstand just as she finished her angry command, and, much to her amazement, the nightstand then began to slowly rise into the air, soon hovering a foot above Ginny's still-prone form.

Upon realizing that she was now free, Ginny scampered backwards, getting away from her spot beneath the floating furniture as quickly as she could. Upon getting to her feet, she felt a weakness come over her left thigh, the one that had been cramping. She sat down on her bed in response, getting the weight off of the leg, and then bent over to pick her wand up from its new spot on the carpet. Wand now in her hand instead of her foot, Ginny got curious and poked the nightstand, almost immediately causing it to fall to the floor, land on its side, and give off a very loud thump as it did. Ginny did not entertain the thought of putting the blasted thing right-side up. Without a second thought, she stretched out, forced her wand into one of her robe's pockets, and left the dormitory, trying very hard to put on the appearance of a witch who hadn't just been attack by a chest of drawers.

The effort was probably unnecessary. The now-smaller set of upper years seemed very much disinclined to pay Ginny, the first year girl of little note, much mind at all as she walked through their midst for yet a third time that morning. If there were anything askew about her appearance, they either didn't notice it or didn't care enough about it, or her, to give any indication that they had. Quietly, Ginny released a very long sigh as she neared the portrait hole, the whole of the morning depressing her thoughts. Up until realizing that she did not have her wand, the morning had not been quite so bad as it currently was, but, for her first full day at Hogwarts, it also had been far from being as enjoyable as she had hoped. Between her slight headache after waking up and the hard time she'd had figuring out just how the faucets and widgets of the shower worked, it had been thoroughly mediocre. Ginny double checked that she still had her wand on her, just in case, as she, for the second time that morning, tried to leave Gryffindor Tower and head to breakfast. This time, she did have her wand, not having lost it in the previous minute, and made it through the portrait hole without incident.

The castle halls didn't have any other students in them, leaving Ginny to head towards the stairs alone, accompanied only by the living portraits and her own thoughts. She remembered the night before, thinking about the sorting and how long it had taken, a line of thought which led her to thinking about Percy, and Fred and George, and then, for the most time of the four, Harry, and how he'd been just the nicest boy of her age that she'd ever met. Of course, she hadn't met many, and she understood the ones that she had to be pretty unique in just how unbearable they could manage to be, what with Fred and George always making a joke out of everything and with Ron always being a bit of a git at even the best of times. Bill and Charlie were nice, though, and Percy was, as he loved to remind her and the rest of his siblings as well as their parents, now a Prefect, Ginny thought to herself as she turned towards and starting walking down the staircase that she remembered being the last one she had walked up the night before on the way from the Great Hall to the tower.

Harry, yes, he had really been fun to talk to. Ginny hoped to see him at breakfast. Hopefully he won't have finished by the time she arrived. Though it didn't matter much, as the whole of their house year would have all the same classes. Hermione might try and get in with him, like she had on the train, but Harry was Ginny's friend, and had sat with her at dinner, not with Hermione, or any of the boys in his year. They all seemed nice, too, though Seamus was a bit loud, Neville was just a touch pathetic, and there just wasn't much to Dean, as far as Ginny could tell.

Consumed by her thoughts, Ginny had just started to think about how there were only four boys in the year compared to there being six girls when her stomach abruptly turned upside down. Ginny had been too busy thinking about the people in her year, and about Harry, to notice that the staircase she was on was moving. Unluckily, she had timed her descent such that she arrived at the bottom step just as it was almost, but not quite, at its new destination. Her mind, running on automatic, expected a stair to be where one wasn't, her foot reaching out to step on nothing but air. Ginny was moving too quickly, and didn't realize just what was happening fast enough, to stop herself from stumbling forward and falling, nothing beneath her but the floor many stories below.

The first thought she had after realizing that she was falling was that she really did not want to be falling. She'd fallen from a broom before, from pretty high up, and even though she'd made it through fine without much in the way of scrapes and bruises, it had hurt quite a lot. Even then, the fall hadn't been from quite so high up, and she'd hit the grass of the rolling fields surrounding the Burrow, not the hard stone floor of Hogwarts. Her second thought was to scream, very loudly, and her third, as she passed by the fifth floor, was to reach for her wand. Maybe, she hoped, she could cast some sort of spell, like she had before, or maybe she could jam it into the wall she was speeding past. Ginny's fingers had only barely touched the polished wood of her wand when she felt a sensation gripping her ankle tight enough to hurt.

It felt like her shin had been hit by a stretching curse, if that were even a thing, as if her bones had been pulled in both directions, like taffy. The absurd feeling in Ginny's ankle was immediately followed up a somersault in her stomach, not unlike how it'd felt when she had missed the step and fallen. Her vision went white, and only when it returned was Ginny able to realize that she was laying on her back against a cold stone floor, not quite dead. She felt awful, nauseous, and briefly thought that maybe she'd have been better off falling all the way and dying as she turned onto her stomach, got onto her hands and knees, and promptly vomited out whatever was left in her stomach from the night before. It took more than a couple seconds for her to notice the suit of armor standing over her. Gingerly, she gave it a thankful wave, and got a salute in return, before turning her gaze back to the stone floor and puking again.

Feeling much too weak to raise her head, Ginny could only hear the enchanted armor clanging as it stepped back to wherever it had been before. She took one deep breath, then a second, and then a third. Her strength a little bit regained, she mustered what little of it she could and leapt to her feet. At least, she tried to, but her ankle failed her the moment she put an ounce of weight on it, the new pain being, instead of weird and strained, sharp and severe. Ginny screamed out a curse and fell to her rear. Now sitting on the stone floor, she extended her legs out straight ahead, then bending the damaged one in at the knee and hoisting its shattered ankle over the thigh of her other leg. The position was decently comfortable, relative to everything else of the last twenty minutes, and taking just one bloody moment was soon decided as the proper course of action.

Once that one bloody moment was up, Ginny had the thought that she should look for her wand. It very easily became apparent that it wasn't on her body, causing her to look around for it. It was nowhere to be found, nowhere along the stretch of corridor she was sitting in, immobilized by a broken ankle. A scan told the girl that she was still in the massive room of the grand staircase, that she hadn't somehow been brought anywhere else. All around were portraits, there on the far side, there across the crevice, there beyond the still-moving staircases, and there on the nearest wall as well. "Are you hurt?" she heard a very fat donkey ask her from a wide-framed painting of a pasture that suited its subject's stature very well.

Ginny didn't care to dignify the question with a response.

With a flurry of thoughts racing through her head, she couldn't focus much on anything. She was worrying about her wand, remembering that she had let go of it when she first felt the iron grip around her ankle, and was still very hungry, the vomiting having really not helped. The stench of the puke wasn't helping matters either, causing her to try and scoot away from the spattering. She succeeded, but not without aggravating the throbbing in her ankle. The increased pain didn't get much attention from the Weasley girl, though, her mind finding itself able to focus on the prospect of having lost her wand. It was a new one, and it wasn't cheap, and her parents really couldn't afford to get her a second one, especially not when she'd lost it on the first day of her first semester. They had Charlie's old one, but Ron needed it for the next year, and if she got it for herself it would mean their parents would have to get him a new one.

And Ginny certainly wasn't going to have a half-broken hand-me-down wand while Ron got to have a brand new one.

She tried again to get to her feet, a plan very clear in her mind. First, she would go down to the first floor, only two flights down, nowhere too far, and find her wand. Then, she would go the Great Hall, have some breakfast, get her class schedule, go to class, and then make a visit to the hospital wing to get her shattered bones mended. Simple and easy, she could do it. There were railings she could lean on, and she doubted that there would be much practical stuff being taught on the first day. Ideally, she'd have potions, no chance of having to dance around and cast spells.

With a flare of determination blazing in her chest, Ginny managed to stand up and not fall down. The pain shooting up from her ankle was absolutely tremendous, but she was able to shove it away somewhere deep within for the first and the second light steps she took on it. By the time she lifted the foot for a third step, however, the pain had gone from being absolutely tremendous to being tremendously absolute, and at the first moment of contact with the hard floor, her ankle failed completely, sending an off-balance Ginny tumbling to the floor for yet another time that morning.

It was then, with Ginny grabbing at her ankle in pain and failing to hold back the tears seeping from her eyes, that a drawl floated towards the writhing girl's ears. "It may be your first day at Hogwarts, Weasley, but I would have thought it obvious that you shouldn't drop your wand down the stairs. You could _hit_ someone with it, after all."

There, standing menacingly at the top of the nearest flight of stairs, about fifteen feet away, was the black-robed, hook-nosed, sallow-faced teacher with greasy skin from the night before, Professor Snape. He, Ginny saw to much relief, was holding up with one hand her unbroken wand. There was an expression on his face that she could not read. It might have been disgusted, or might have been thoughtful. Or maybe it was some combination of the two. Regardless, Ginny thought to herself, of all the people she could have wished to find her, she had the strong suspicion that he should perhaps be the very last.


	4. His First Morning

Harry's first morning at Hogwarts was going very well, he decided. Sitting at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall, eating a breakfast that had managed to somehow be better than the dinner food from the night before, the young wizard was just feeling good about how things were going. It would have been impossible for him to suppress the warm feeling of contentment swelling up inside even if he had wanted to, which he very much did not. He was at Hogwarts, he was away from the Dursleys, and he'd already made friends.

The enchanted ceiling above showered the tables in a warm morning sunlight that went very well with the small stack of perfectly prepared bacon and the assortment of jellied toasts that Harry was digging into. To one side of him was the end of the long table, and to the other was Seamus Finnegan, who was talking animatedly with a second-year about that sport called Quidditch. Harry listened in for a bit, but much of the jargon flew over his head, the briefing on the subject that Ginny had enthusiastically given him the day before not proving helpful. At the thought of the red-haired witch, Harry looked up from his meal, for a third time intending to try and find her in the breakfast crowd. Again to his disappointment, he found that she hadn't shown up yet, though none of the first-year Gryffindor girls had. It would probably just be a matter of waiting, he decided, and then went back to his food.

With a bite of toast between his teeth, Harry found himself looking at Neville, a thought having just crossed his mind. "You said you live with your grandmother, didn't you, Neville?"

Neville seemed startled by being asked a question. "Uh, yes, I do," he answered.

"Why?" Harry asked innocently. Neville's face paled at the question, causing Harry to worry if he'd said something wrong. "I'm just wondering," he added. "I grew up with my aunt and uncle, because, um, you would know, I suppose."

"Oh," Neville muttered. "Yeah."

Harry got the feeling that the other boy really didn't want to discuss the subject, so he went back to food. Just as soon as he had another bite in his mouth, the doors to the hall swung upon, the rest of the first-year Gryffindor spilling through. Ginny, Harry saw to great disappointment as well as surprise, was not among them. He looked over the group twice, thinking that maybe she was behind one of the others and just physically blocked from sight, but it quickly became obvious that Ginny, as well as her mane of red hair, was nowhere in the area.

"Hey, Hermione!" Harry called out to the other girl from the previous day's train.

She jumped at the sound of her name, startled, but then turned to Harry with a friendly smile. "Yes?" she asked, eyes wide and weirdly eager.

"Um," Harry stumbled, "do you know where Ginny is? She hasn't been down here, I thought she'd be with all of you."

"Oh," Hermione frowned. "She went back to get her wand from the dormitory. I suppose she left it behind, though I'm not sure why she'd need to have it at breakfast."

"So she should be down here pretty soon?" Harry continued.

Hermione nodded and went to join the rest of the girls, leaving Harry alone and waiting for Ginny to get down. Minutes went by, and she didn't show. A conversation with Dean soon distracted Harry from his vigil, with the two boys speculating about what how their classes would go, what it all would be like.

Professor McGonagall arrived at their spot of the table soon enough, emerging from nowhere and startling both Harry and Dean. In her arms she held a short stack of parchments. "Here are your schedules," she said, warmly and with a smile that seemed a bit ill-fitting for her stern features. "Your first class at Hogwarts will be Transfiguration, with me."

"Lucky us?" Seamus joked, actually earning himself a chuckle from his Head of House.

"Lucky you," McGonagall confirmed.

When Harry grabbed his own schedule, he thought to ask McGonagall the same question he'd asked Hermione. The professor frowned in response, "No, I haven't. Miss Weasley really should be down here," she answered before finishing with her handing out and returning to the staff table.

It would be best, Harry decided, to wait until Ginny arrived, even after he'd finished with all the food he wanted to eat. An examination of the schedule revealed that the first class wouldn't be for another hour, and as the rest of his year, as well as the bulk of all the students in the hall, finished with their meals and began to file out of the area, it became increasingly apparent that he would have to be there to give Ginny some company.

It wasn't too long until almost everyone had left, leaving Harry sitting alone at the end of the table. There were only a handful of other students around, and much of the staff had departed as well, including McGonagall and Dumbledore. One of the students caught Harry's attention, the Slytherin first year whom Harry recognized from Madame Malkin's, and from his being hexed by Ginny's brothers the night before. Much to Harry's surprise, the boy purposefully made his way over to where he sat, his silvery hair reflecting a bit of the ceiling's sunlight.

"Do you mind if I join you?" the boy asked, something about his tone giving Harry the impression that he really wasn't asking.

"Why not?" Harry answered, shrugging as he did.

The boy sat across from Harry, hesitating for a moment as if he thought the table might not let him, and extended his hand. "The name's Malfoy. Draco Malfoy. I don't think we've had the pleasure."

Harry narrowed his eyes before hesitantly, for just a second, taking Malfoy's hand. "No, we have," Harry said. "At Madame Malkin's, remember?"

To his credit, Malfoy looked surprised. "Oh, that was you?" He took a moment to think. "I suppose that does make sense, all things considered. You never did tell me your name."

Harry shrugged. "I suppose you were right, about being put into Slytherin."

Malfoy's seemed a bit put off. "What do you mean by that?" he questioned.

"You said that you knew you were going to be put into Slytherin back in Diagon Alley, unless I'm remembering wrong. The hat sure did put you there quickly."

"Oh," Malfoy demurred. "Yes, it did do that. It took a while with you, though, didn't it? Almost thought you would be a hat stall," he continued, nothing about his words casual.

Harry thought about asking what a hat stall was, but quickly thought that it must be in the name, and that he didn't want to appear stupid or anything. So instead, he nodded. "The hat was saying that maybe it should put me into Slytherin, actually. It said I'd do well there."

If it were possible for eyes to both widen and narrow simultaneously, Malfoy's would have. "So why did it put you into Gryffindor, then?"

"I think because I asked it to," Harry shrugged.

Malfoy seemed confused, and very offended. "You can do that? Why would you ask to be put into Gryffindor, and not in Slytherin?"

Harry thought for a moment, to find the answer, both for himself and so he wouldn't somehow offend the blond boy across the table. "Well, I didn't plan on it before hand, I just asked."

"But why?" Malfoy pushed, the way he said it making Harry feel uncomfortable.

"I talked about the houses with Ginny and Hermione on the train, and they both said that Gryffindor was the best, and I agreed."

"Ginevra Weasley? And that one mudblood?" Malfoy questioned with an incredulous gasp.

"Mudblood? What's that? Do you mean Hermione?" Harry asked rapidly, the words spilling out, himself feeling childish. The word sounded like it was very much an insult, a really bad one, and he really didn't get the feeling that Hermione had ever done anything worth insulting beyond talking a little too much.

"Oh," Malfoy started, looking he didn't know how to answer the questions. "Mudblood, it's a word for the people who use magic whose parents were muggles."

"Still sounds like an insult, not just a word," Harry commented. Malfoy had insulted Hagrid back in Diagon Alley, he remembered, and now had, Harry very strongly suspected, insulted Hermione, who had been perfectly pleasant and friendly, if a bit annoying at times. Someone else too by implication, Harry realized. "So my mother was a mudblood?" he asked, feeling more than a bit angry.

If Malfoy knew whatever the spell was to shrink himself, if there even were one, he looked like he'd have used it. Instead, however, his pale skin just grew red and he stammered a bit in response. "It's really not an insult," he managed out.

Harry couldn't quite bring himself to believe Malfoy at his word, even though he did want to. He seemed thoroughly unpleasant. "I think I'll ask Ginny what it means. She'd probably know."

Malfoy's face had turned very sour by the time he responded. "Ginevra Weasley?" he asked for the second time.

Harry didn't miss the disapproval in the other boy's tone at his friend's name, though he really couldn't imagine where could have come from. "That's the one," he said slowly. "As I was saying, I spent the train ride with her, and she said that her whole family had been in Gryffindor, so I thought that she'd certainly get put there too, and I wanted to be with my friend," Harry explained. "And Hermione had already been sorted there, too."

"Well," Malfoy stated with some regained composure. "I was going to head down to find you and introduce myself, but then…" he trailed off, gesturing to is face.

"You get hexed?" Harry stated pointedly, having the thought that he should maybe give Fred and George something of a thank-you.

"Yes, hexed," Malfoy sneered, though not really at Harry. "Maybe if I hadn't been, we'd have gotten along, and you'd have asked to be put in Slytherin," he pondered.

Probably not, Harry thought, rather doubting that either himself or Ginny would have gotten along too well with Malfoy had the boy shown up like Hermione had. He certainly didn't like him much at the moment. "Maybe," he said, diplomatically, trying not to make an enemy so early.

Before Malfoy could say something in response, a very loud, very high-pitched, very shrill, and very terrified-sounding shriek attacked both his and Harry's ears, causing both of the boys to flinch and look towards the open doorway to the Great Hall.

"What was that?" Harry asked.

Malfoy looked at Harry. "Did that Hagrid tell you that Dumbledore was going to bring a banshee into the castle? Is that why we're not supposed to go to the third floor corridor?"

"No?" Harry answered, unsure where the question came from.

"And we're not dead, so it couldn't be a banshee," Malfoy continued, speaking to himself and not to harry. He looked visibly frightened. Harry thought of Seamus and one of the stories he'd told, wondering what his Irish classmate thought of the screech.

"Oh, it was probably just one of the portraits," Malfoy concluded. "Someone probably spilled something onto one of them."

Harry just nodded along. Not wanting to spend much more time with the other boy, and with several questions to ask Ginny as soon as he could find her, Harry stood up from his seat and extended his hand to Malfoy, imitating how the other had started the conversation. "My first class is pretty soon, and I don't think it would be good to be late."

Malfoy took a moment to register, and then too stood up and took Harry's hand. "I don't think we have a class with each other today, but I do hope we can get along in the future. I suspect you have much to learn about our world. I can help you there."

"Maybe you can" Harry evaded, thinking to himself that he probably didn't want Malfoy's help, with anything or everything. He gave his new acquaintance a nod, turned, and left the Great Hall at speed, not sparing a second glance.

Outside, there was gathered a decent amount of students, all muttering with each other, creating a murmur. It was probably about whatever had caused that scream, Harry determined. He was a little bit interested, but, as he had told Malfoy, his first class at Hogwarts was approaching quickly and there wasn't much time left to find Ginny.

Harry pushed his way through the crowd and proceeded up the main staircase, intent on getting up to Gryffindor Tower as quickly as possible. The first and second flights of stairs led to levels devoid of other students, and on the third was some professor whom he didn't recognize. " _Tergeo_ ," Harry heard the professor say, but gave the spell and its caster little mind as he rushed past.

When Harry reached the Fat Lady's portrait standing guard over the entrance to Gryffindor Tower, he was barely able to say the password he was wheezing so hard. His thoughts were on the advantages that lifts enjoyed over stairs as he burst into the Gryffindor common room and saw that Ginny was not there, nor was anyone else. Having not seen any hint of her or her red hair on his way up through the castle, Harry decided to try the girl's dormitories. If she wasn't at breakfast, and she wasn't in the common room, and wasn't anywhere else in the castle, then Ginny had to be in her dormitory, right? It wasn't like she could be at the Transfiguration classroom, as she hadn't been down to get her schedule. She had no way of knowing that Transfiguration was the first class, though maybe one of the girls had gone back up to tell her?

No, Harry determined, she wouldn't have just skipped breakfast.

Now within the spiral staircase that led to the girls' dormitories, Harry found his thoughts suddenly interrupted by a sharp, loud, wailing klaxon. Underneath his right foot, the stair disappeared, and his left foot, hoisted in the air when the noise had sounded, came down on a sharply slanted surface. Immediately, Harry stumbled over his ankles and fell backwards, landing squarely on his back.

Winded from the run through the castle, hurt by the hard fall, and still a bit angry from his conversation with Draco Maloy, Harry just lay there, at the front of the slide that had been the staircase to Ginny's dormitory, in a heap, in pain, with no idea what to do. He was in that state for however long it was until an older-looking Gryffindor girl came sliding down the staircase, landed on two feet, and extended Harry a hand, a very happy and friendly look in her eyes and across her face.

"No boys allowed," she explained cheerily, looking Harry over.

Harry reached out and took her hand, very grateful for the assistance. With the burning in his chest and the ache in his back, he was pretty sure that he couldn't have gotten up without it.

"First year? You really don't want to be late to your first glance, especially if it's McGonagall's. Or Snape's."

"McGonagall's," Harry informed the young woman, whose eyes grew wide at what Harry presumed to be the sight of his scar.

"You're Harry Potter?" she asked. Harry nodded. "Why were you trying to get into the girls' dormitories anyway?"

"My friend didn't show up for breakfast, the other girls said she'd gone back to find her wand. I thought maybe she was still in her dorm, still looking for it, or something," he mumbled.

The upper-year smiled gently. "There's nobody in the first years' dorm right now. I looked in on my done, didn't see anybody in there."

Harry felt his stomach drop at her words. There wasn't any more time to look for Ginny, and he'd really, really wanted to talk to her. His disappointment must have shown on his face, as the other girl leaned down with a smile even more gentle than the previous. "Whoever it is you're looking for; she'll probably be at class. Just meet her there," she suggested, and then left, a couple strands of her wet hair hitting Harry as she went on her way.

She, he thought, must not be much of a morning person. And, he told himself, was probably wrong about Ginny being there in Transfiguration. She had no way of knowing that she should be there. McGonagall had seemed upset enough that Ginny hadn't shown up for breakfast. Just how angry would she be if Ginny was absent for class as well? Or, if Harry was late for it?

The thought got Harry moving with haste. He started retracing his steps, back away from the girls' spiral staircase, back through the common room, and back down the spiral cases to the ground floor, where he arrived in front of where the schedule he'd been given claimed the Transfiguration classroom stood.

The schedule, as it turned out, was correct. There, outside of the room, waiting, were Dean, Seamus, and Neville, and Hermione and all the other first year Gryffindor girls all gathered in a crowd. In addition, in a larger crowd, was a bunching of kids whom Harry recognized by their yellow ties as Hufflepuffs. Nowhere in either grouping of students was the red-haired girl from the train, and from the previous night's feast.

"There you are!" Seamus practically shouted when he first saw Harry. "You were about to be late, you know. I don't think McGonagall would have been too happy if you were. She doesn't seem the sort to give you a pass even if it's the first day, you know?"

"Yeah, she doesn't," Harry agreed. "Have you seen Ginny?" he immediately followed up.

"Oh, didn't you hear?" Seamus asked.

"Hear what?" Harry asked as he felt his stomach drop. Had something bad happened to Ginny? Had she done something wrong? Was she not actually able to do magic and had to be sent home? No, she could, he'd seen it.

"She fell," Dean told Harry.

"Took a step right off the end of a staircase while it was moving. Dropped right down, would have smacked the floor if one of the knights hadn't-" Seamus elaborated.

"Is she okay?" Harry cut him off.

"I think so. Dean and I were on one of the staircases, saw her falling right by us, you know. One of the Professors, I think Snape, told everyone to stay away and went and got her. I saw him carrying her, to the hospital wing I'd imagine. Didn't seem happy about it, though."

Any further explanation from Seamus was cut off by the arrival of Professor McGonagall, who had a very severe expression on her face. "Come on in," she ordered as she unlocked and push open the door to the classroom.

The students did as they were told, filing in and taking spots at the classroom's desks. Dean and Seamus sat together at one, Neville and Hermione at another, and the other four Gryffindor girls who were present paired off as well. Harry wandered around until he found an empty desk. The one he found was, to some surprise, next to the desk sat at by the same two girls with whom he and Ginny had shared a boat across the lake the night before. Susan Bones, Harry recognized one as, and Hannah something, the other. He gave them a quick smile and turned his attention to McGonagall, who was just starting to speak.

"Transfiguration represents the most complex, as well as some of the most dangerous, magic that you will learn at Hogwarts," she lectured. "If anyone decides to mess around in my class, they will leave and not come back. The power of Transfiguration is not to be underestimated; it would not be the first time for a student to cause grievous harm to themselves or to another through sheer carelessness. One mistake, one slip-up, one error, or even just one second of lapsed attention could result in catastrophe"

She walked over to her desk and made some motions at it with her hand. Where before sat an imposing block of intricately carved mahogany was now a very large, living, breathing, and neighing horse of the same color. As quickly as the horse appeared, however, it disappeared, returning to its desk-form at a flick of McGonagall's wand.

"I once had a sixth-year student who transfigured the head of the girl he had been chasing into that of a horse because he'd been joking around with his friends during class. Needless to say, he lost whatever chance he had with her."

Harry imagined himself continuing the work Hagrid had started and giving Dudley a pig's head. He smiled at the mental image, earning himself McGonagall's attention. "Something funny, Mister Potter?"

"No, Professor," Harry shook his head.

"Good," McGonagall continued. She flicked her wand towards one of the chalkboards, causing writing to appear, and began to lecture.

Harry tried to pay attention, but quickly realized that he was the only one in the room not taking notes. He couldn't, he had no quill and no parchment, not having brought his schoolbag down to breakfast as it seemed everybody else had.

"Could I borrow some parchment, and a quill?" he asked Susan Bones, who silently nodded and handed over what had been requested before quickly returning her attention to McGonagall. McGonagall, who Harry could see had noted his exchange and elected not to chastise him for it.

The class went on, the lecture about what it really meant to transfigure something eventually turning over into some practical learning. McGonagall levitated matches over to every student with the instruction to turn it into a needle. She wrote the words for the spell on the board and made several methodical demonstrations of the proper wand motion before setting her students out on their own to make an attempt.

Alone, Harry gave it his best go, doing what he could to block out everybody else in the room. He looked over his notes after each attempt, trying to identify what was going wrong. He was saying right words, and he was making the right motions of his hand, at least he thought he was, but not much of anything was happening. A look around the room revealed that Hermione had gotten her match to change its color to a metallic silver, causing Harry to look back at his with newfound determination. Ginny would have managed to do it by now, he was sure. Both she and Hermione had been better than him on the train. If she couldn't be in class, he'd have to do it for her.

The handful of attempts Harry then attempted produced little results, causing him to reevaluate how he was doing things. With borrowed quill in hand, he drew as accurately as he could a diagram of the spell's hand motions. Then, he took a deep look at every line he'd written down about the nature of transfiguration itself, and started connecting any apparently relevant points to parts of the spell that he thought they went with. The act of change, he suspected, went with the full spiral motion, and the single, precisely defined jab informed the subject of the desired result. _Mutatio_ , he connected to the changing spiral, and _lignumaes_ he suspected went with the direction.

Hoping very hard that his next attempt would not fail quite so hard as his previous ones, that the wood of the match would change to metal, Harry went through the motions very precisely and spoke " _mutatio lignumaes_ " very slowly, all with his eyes closed, and upon opening saw that his match was not in the shape of a needle, but was very much metal. Harry picked it up and examined it, noting that it was much heavier than it had been before. The action caught McGonagall's attention, who came over from where she had been, there by Hermione giving her three points for her own success, to look over Harry's work.

Hermione's, Harry saw, actually looked like a needle, pointed and silver looking, while his still looked very much like a match, albeit a match with the color and feel of iron.

"Those are some clever notes you've written, Mister Potter," McGonagall told Harry. "Tell me, though, did you actually think of changing your match into a needle when you performed the spell?"

Harry blinked. "Uh, no, I didn't," he realized and admitted.

"Next time, you probably should," McGonagall smiled. "Nonetheless, excellent work, Potter. Another three points to Gryffindor."

Harry looked down at his shoes upon seeing the mild looks of admiration that Susan and Hannah briefly cast towards him, and didn't see McGonagall return to her desk. A poking on his shoulder caused him to look up, and there he saw Susan Bones, leaning over, and heard her asking if he could show her how he did it, payback for the quill and parchment. He agreed, and slid over what she'd loaned to him.

For Harry, it was enjoyable enough just to watch the two Hufflepuff girls follow what he wrote, and by the end of class, he had gotten his notes back and the girls had gotten four points between them for their house as a result of their own success.

Harry was on his way out the door, grumbling a bit about the heap of homework that'd been assigned and trailing behind all of the others, when McGonagall called out to him. "Oh, Mister Potter, would you stay behind for a moment, please?" she ordered.

Gulping before he did, Harry turned around and walked towards the Professor's desk. "Yes?" he asked, nervously.

"Well, Potter," McGonagall started, "as I'm sure you've discovered by now, your friend Ginevra Weasley had quite the accident this morning, which is why she couldn't show up to the Great Hall for breakfast. Professor Snape got to her aid first, and took her to the hospital wing. I'm told her ankle required some extra effort from Madame Pomfrey to repair, but that it is healed now. Professor Snape should be here with her any moment. Unfortunately, I have a class in ten minutes and beyond that have much to do, so I will be unable to catch her up on today's material before the next lesson I have with your year. I would normally ask a prefect to help, but as you took some very good notes and seemed to understand the material well, I think I can rely on you to help Ginevra get caught up?"

Harry nodded in affirmation.

"Of course, course, this will exempt you from today's homework assignment," McGonagall added, before giving Harry a pointed look. "And only from today's assignment."

"Thank you, Professor," Harry eagerly responded.

"And there she is," McGonagall announced and looked up from Harry, causing him to turn around. There indeed Ginny was, a thoroughly unpleasant expression on both her face and the face of the greasy-looking professor accompanying her. "And there you are, Severus. I do appreciate your assistance, as does Miss Weasley, I'm sure."

Harry watched as Ginny mumbled out an insincere thanks to the Professor who had his hand grabbing her shoulder.

"I will once again remind you to avoid falling, Miss Weasley," he drawled. "Madame Pomfrey and I both have better things to do than spend our time tending to clumsy first-years."

McGonagall narrowed her lips and glared at Snape, who in turned seemed to notice Harry and glare at him. "And this is?" he asked, as if he already knew the answer.

"Harry Potter, I believe you'll have him in class on Friday," McGonagall answered. "I'm sure you'll enjoy being his Potions teacher."

"Is that so? I'm not quite so confident," Harry heard Snape drawl, and was a bit off-put by the words, but he was nonetheless not looking at the man, instead looking at Ginny, whose brown eyes had brightened significantly at the news that she'd just have to study with her friend, instead of anything more severe for missing class. Harry gave her a smile which she returned in kind.

"He did some impressive work in today's class, which is why I felt comfortable assigning him to help Miss Weasley here catch up on the material she missed," McGonagall stated. "Now, I do have another class very soon, as do each of you. Potter and Weasley, in case you've forgot, you've Charms, up on the second floor. All of you, please, have a good rest of your day."

With everything to say having evidently been said, McGonagall turned her attention to her desk, Snape in turn rushed out of the room, followed well behind by Harry and Ginny, the latter of whom turned to her companion after seeing the last trace of Professor Snape's cloak disappear into a faraway corridor.

"I really _hate_ that man," she informed Harry.

"Didn't he help you out?"

"I almost wish he'd left me to crawl to the infirmary," Ginny said, her tone dark and her expression dead-serious.

"Huh," Harry answered. "He doesn't seem to like me very much. I don't think it'd be a hard choice between you and him, even if he did."


	5. Inconsequential Happenings

"I think you've gotten it!"

For much of the evening following the second day's dinner feast, the Gryffindor common room had been bustling in activity. Around the mildly roaring fireplace, its intricate stonework of lion's heads and various flourishes darkened and scarred by centuries of nighttime flames, sat a grouping of older girls sharing with one another the observations and gossips from the first full day of the schoolyear. Elsewhere, sitting around each other in a triangle of plush armchairs, were a trio of older students widely regarded by the school's staff as troublemakers; each were leaning in, firmly entrenched upon only the edges of their seats, to see what the outcome of the current round of their game of exploding snap would be. In a clearing devoid of furniture, two seventh-year students were standing and casting various charms and jinxes at each other, much to the enjoyment of the gathering of first and second years that was thoroughly enraptured by the magical display. Beneath all of the noise, some of the more studious students were looking through their books, fretting about the next day's lessons and the homework assignments they'd been given hours earlier. There was an ebb and flow to the population, with both individuals and the occasional group making their way to and from the stairs that led upwards to the dormitories.

In one corner of the tower chamber, sitting comfortably beneath an overhanging window sill, were two first-year students gazing at a needle with nothing but an utmost fascination.

"And nobody else did but you? In class?" Ginny Weasley asked Harry Potter, not for a single second looking away from her success.

"There were a couple others that managed it too," Harry shrugged.

"Oh," Ginny muttered, frowning and looking down at her lap as she did.

"Yours is definitely better than mine, though," Harry assured Ginny, truthfully. Her attempt at transfiguration did look a bit better than what he had managed, though he was sure that what he'd managed wasn't too great regardless.

"I'd have probably gotten it done sooner if your handwriting wasn't so horrid," Ginny commented before holding up the parchment covered in Harry's notes, her expression inscrutable. "Practically scribbles, these are. Chicken scratch, really."

Harry, not sure whether he should feel insulted, caught a hint of a smile tugging at edges of Ginny's dead-serious eyes. He laughed and leaned forward, snatching away his notes. "Don't insult the professor, Ginny."

"I'm completely serious, it's awful," Ginny laughed before calming. "I do reserve the right to insult _a_ professor."

Harry felt his eyebrows rise. "Was Professor Snape really that awful?"

Ginny leaned forward. "He seriously would not stop with the snide comments."

"Like what?" Harry wondered.

"Well, he said that he'd give me detention if I dropped my wand on him again."

"That's not too bad," Harry shrugged.

"It just was the way he said it, and everything else. He was just so mean!" Ginny complained at a high volume.

"Who was so mean?" came a shaky voice.

Harry turned his head to see who it was that had asked the question. Standing, and so towering, above him and Ginny, who were sitting, was Neville Longbottom. Harry hadn't spoken with him since that morning's breakfast, and, judging by the look on her face, Ginny didn't really have much of a clue as to what to make of the boy.

"Snape," she sneered in answer.

"B-but didn't he take you to the hospital wing?" Neville questioned, standing very upright with his arms stiff at his sides and looking very ready to retreat behind a curtain, a curtain that wasn't there. Was there a spell for that, to conjure up a curtain? Harry imagined that it would be quite useful if there were.

"Technically," Ginny affirmed with as much distaste she could muster. For Neville or for Snape, Harry wasn't entirely sure, though he suspected that it was mostly for the latter.

Neville flinched at Ginny's tone, now looking even more as though he'd like to hide. "You're alright, though, right?"

"Right," Ginny nodded slowly and spoke accordingly. "Good as new."

"T-that's good," Neville stammered.

"Though what did you actually do?" Harry jumped in. "To your leg, that is?"

"Ankle, actually," Ginny answered with a glance that told Harry a firm _you know this already_. "Broke the bone at four spots and tore the tendons, too, whatever they are."

Neville turned a mild shade of green at the thought. "Was it bad getting it healed?" he asked.

"Felt a bit weird, really, especially the tendons, but it didn't hurt much," Ginny shrugged.

At that, Neville abandoned his bout of nervousness and replaced with an appearance of real interest. "Just like that? How long it'd take?"

"Only a couple of minutes," Ginny explained, leading herself and Neville into a conversation about healing magic that Harry only gave the faintest bit of attention to. Instead, he paid great interest to a piece of stonework sitting near his head, and thought about the sallow-faced, greasy-skinned professor who had driven Ginny to hatred within an hour and had given Harry the distinct impression that his presence was not welcome. Was he like that to all the students? To all Gryffindors? To just Ginny in particular, and maybe Harry too? The sound of Neville's voice inquiring about the specific spell floating past Harry's ears as his thoughts turned from Snape to Dudley. Had the muggle doctors been able to get rid of the tail? They could have simply, he supposed, just cut it off, unless there was some sort of magic preventing it. That would, Harry thought, have to have hurt at least a little, an observation that put a bit of a smile onto his face.

The smile didn't leave for the rest of the evening, as the common room gradually emptied and Harry found himself dazing off in the soft heat of his surroundings. At some point into the night, well after the last remnants of the sun had vanished over the horizon beyond the window pane and long since Ginny herself had retired up the tower, Harry and Neville made the way, not completely aware of their surroundings, to their own beds. They parted ways without a word, and Harry fell asleep before his head had even touched the pillow.

The subsequent morning was a difficult one for Harry. Everything felt as if it were happening at half-speed, from the effort to raise himself out of bed to the ordeal of reaching the baths to freshen up to the complexities of getting into the school robes. The journey down to the Great Hall for breakfast alongside the rest of his year went more quickly, with all the students being very mindful of any trick steps or missing landings, particularly Ginny, whose unpleasant experience the day before had evidently made an impact. Harry himself wasn't too attentive to what was underneath his feet, though he did take mind to make sure he never lifted his back foot until the front was on solid ground.

The breakfast itself did a decent enough job of getting him, and the rest of his classmates, going for the day. It was with only a little weight dragging down on his eyelids that Harry made it to his first class of the day, Defense Against the Dark Arts with Professor Quirrell, whom Harry found to be somewhere far below his expectations, or at least far below his hopes. For a class about battling dark magic, the stench of garlic didn't do much to build an atmosphere; for a wizard who claimed such achievements as did Quirrell, the professor couldn't quite tell a believable story about how he managed them; for a subject that at first hearing sounded fascinating, the curriculum seemed remarkably boring as it was described. On Thursday night, when Harry expressed his thoughts on the matter to Ginny, she dismissed his concerns, assuring him that "all of the interesting stuff gets taught when we're older."

Harry supposed that made sense. Eleven year-olds really probably couldn't do much. He knew he couldn't do any more than most anyone else, and not even Hermione or Ginny or any of the Ravenclaws had been able to cast even the basic charms with any real consistency. It really helped, though, that all of the professors clearly understood the situation, and had experience with it. Professor McGonagall, who hadn't spoken much to Harry since he reported on his one-off tutoring session with Ginny, was spending most moments lecturing on the simplest theories. Professor Flitwick, on the other hand, allowed for plenty of fun in his charms classroom, Harry thought as, late Thursday evening, he laid on his bed while twirling his wand in the air. The rest of the teachers fell somewhere between the two on the spectrum, with Professor Binns, in the two History of Magic classes of his that Harry had gone through, taking a dip into sheer boredom. The only real constant between all of the classes was the mounds of homework that they all handed out.

The only class that they hadn't had yet was Potions, with Professor Snape, about whom Harry had heard no positive things from the older students. Ginny's testimonial, too, had, of course, not been glowing. When she and Harry had parted ways after finishing the four tons of transfiguration work that had been assigned that day, Ginny told him that she was going to do some reading in the potions book, that she didn't want to Snape to catch her off guard.

Harry had taken her idea for his own and returned to his dorm to read his own book on his own bed, and had managed to do so for a little while before putting the tome down and starting to throw his wand in the air. The dormitory was empty, everyone else still out in the common room, leaving Harry alone with his dwindling thoughts. It was not long until he was asleep, well before any of the other first-year boys appeared.

The next morning made Harry thankful for his early bedtime the night before. He was awake before anyone else, even before, as a glance towards of the window revealed, the sun had risen. He set off preparing for the day even as there were still stars hanging in the sky beyond the castle's walls, and had finished by the time the first blazing red rays of the morning sun peeked over the horizon.

The view was magnificent. Beyond the battlements and the walls were rolling grass hills that melded smoothly into the lake, which was as smooth as glass this morning, its surface softly reflecting the rising sun's red glow. Beyond the rolling hills and calm water was the so-called Forbidden Forest, an unending bloc of thick green above which only the faintest hints of distant mountains were visible. And down by its edge was a large hut with yellow light spilling from its windows and soft puffs of smoke curling upwards from a stubby chimney.

An idea struck Harry. He cracked open the window, intending to check on the very early morning air. It was, he discovered, pleasantly cool, and so he set out towards the portrait hole and had soon left Gryffindor Tower well behind.

For a short minute, as he carefully descended down the caste's moving staircases, Harry wondered if the nighttime curfew still applied to the early morning hours. He also wondered if he particularly cared at the moment, and found the answer to be that no, he didn't. The question turned out to be unimportant when he ended up reaching the ground floor and pushing out into the open air through a pair of side doors without any interruption.

By then, the sun had fully risen over the horizon, making it very easy for Harry to make out where he was going. There was a footpath leading from the castle to the hut at the edge of the forest, and Harry walked along it, mind blank and relaxed.

It was when Harry reached throwing distance of the cabin that he realized that he didn't actually know for sure that Hagrid lived there. It seemed strongly implied that he did, by most all indications, but he didn't remember ever being explicitly told that the giant of a man made his home. Shrugging, Harry kept forward, really doubting that there could be anyone else living in such a place.

Just before he would have knocked on Hagrid's very solid-looking wooden door, Harry caught in the corner of his eye a very, very large crossbow leaning against the walls of the cabin in the shadows by his feet. Was there really much a crossbow could handle that magic couldn't? Or maybe it was a magic crossbow? Hagrid had said that he wasn't allowed to do magic, but he still could and did manage it, as Harry had seen firsthand.

Deciding that he hadn't come so far just to admire an abnormally large crossbow, Harry raised his knuckles to the wood and rapt off a knock that he hoped didn't sound too demanding. One second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds passed by until the heavy slab of wood flung inward and was replaced by an even more impressive mass of brown.

"Eh, an' who's there?" Hagrid asked the air before looking down and seeing Harry. Half-illuminated by the distant sun, his features, as much as Harry could see them through the mess of facial hair, lit up. "What're you doin' here, Harry?"

"I was up early, so I thought maybe I'd drop by," Harry explained.

"Oh, get in here," Hagrid bellowed as he moved aside and waved Harry in. "Careful ter be quiet, wouldn' wanna wake Fang. He don' much like it when he gets woken up."

Harry resisted the urge to comment that he simply couldn't be louder than Hagrid had just been and sat quietly in the chair that Hagrid quickly pulled out for him.

"Make yehself at home." Hagrid insisted, soon putting down a mug of a very strong-looking tea in front of Harry. "It's good ter see yeh. I was gonna write yeh an invitation to come here this afternoon, actually."

Harry took a tentative sip of the very dark liquid in front of him, and then a second one as Hagrid started up talking again. "So, have yeh made any friends, Harry?" Hagrid asked.

"A couple, I think," Harry said, softly, before taking a third sip.

"Who? Not any of the Slytherins, I'd think."

"No," Harry shook his head, "not any of them. Ginny Weasley, for one."

"One of the Weasley, eh? Have yeh met her brothers? The twins?"

Harry sharply nodded, earning himself a laugh from Hagrid. "They're a lot to handle," the very large man laughed. "I don' think I've had ter chase the rest of the school away from the forest as much as I've had ter those two. This girl much like 'em?"

It took Harry a moment to ponder the question. "A little bit, but not a whole lot."

"That's good. It'd be good not ter have ter deal with any extra trouble she'd cause if she were," Hagrid commented. "I'd offer yeh some breakfast, but I can't cook as good as what you'll get up at the school."

"Oh, I'm not too hungry," Harry demurred.

"And how're your classes?" Hagrid added. Harry answered, going into his complaints and into the stuff he'd been liking, how he'd been good the first day of Transfiguration and how Charms seemed like a fun class, and how Defense Against the Defense Arts felt like a bit of a joke. Hagrid, eyes narrowed, asked what Harry thought about Potions.

"I haven't had it yet- got it today, I'm pretty sure," Harry answered. "Ginny really hates Professor Snape, though."

"That so?" Hagrid asked.

"She says he was mean to her the first day, when she fell and broke her ankle."

"I remember hearin' about that," Hagrid nodded.

After the exchange, Harry and Hagrid sat alone in silence for a little bit, Harry quickly downing the strong tea Hagrid had served him. A thought popped into his head. "Hagrid, what's on the third floor that's so dangerous?"

"What? Why do yeh think there's somethin' dangerous there?" Hagrid said, suddenly belligerent. In the corner of the hut, Fang, the dog, seemed to wake.

"Dumbledore said we'd die a most painful death if we went there," Harry shrugged. "Sounds dangerous enough."

"Ah," Hagrid muttered. "Don't you worry, Harry. What's there isn't for you to worry about, it's Hogwarts business."

"Hogwarts business?" Harry asked, thinking he'd heard that term before.

"Just ignore it, and focus on yer studies, won' yeh? Hagrid insisted. He and Harry sat in his hut for a little while longer, talking a bit and being happily silent even more, up until the moment Hagrid took a look at the clock over his fireplace and announced that they should be heading up to the castle for the real breakfast.


End file.
